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Sam and Dean are at another nasty hotel complete with a mess of cockroaches in the beds and a spider infestation in the bathroom. Needless to say, Dean doesn’t wake up refreshed with a long night’s sleep under his belt. His eyes are droopy and his back hurts from sleeping on the rickety old mattress. He doesn’t want to think about getting old. So when he wakes up to an empty room and the car gone from the parking lot, he’s seething. He can’t believe after Lucifer, and Ruby, and Sam’s betrayal, that he would just get up and leave without telling Dean. You’d think he’d learn after a while.
Sam arrives twenty minutes later with two cups of coffee balanced precariously in one hand and a breakfast sausage sandwich (presumably for Dean, lord knows the kid never eats that crap, just another sign of his snobbery) in the other. Dean’s waiting outside the motel room door for him when he comes. “Where the hell were you?” Dean bites out, doing nothing to mask the anger just below the surface of his voice.
Sam doesn’t even bother answering the question, just looks down at the ground. He knows what exactly he did wrong, yet he still chose to do it. Somehow, that makes this whole thing worse. “Look, I’m sorry. I know I should have let you know I was leaving, but you were sleeping and-” Sam doesn’t have the chance to finish his sentence before Dean is punching him directly in the face, hard enough that he can already see a bruise blossoming. It’s not that he wanted to do that, really; Sam just needs to learn to not up and disappear without warning a month after starting the freaking apocalypse doing exactly that.
Years later when Dean says, “New rule: you take my baby, you get punched” neither of them will mention that it’s not actually a new rule. It will just be the first time they dare to verbalize it so explicitly.
“Get inside, Sam,” Dean says, and he recognizes the tone in his voice. It’s the one his dad would use on both him and Sam when they were younger. Dean had grown up and no longer needs to be bossed around like that, but Sam, well, the world pays whenever Sam tries to make decisions for himself. It’s just the way his brain works, and it’s Dean’s duty to watch out for him and keep him from screwing up that badly again.
He’s about to follow inside himself when he hears a shout from a few doors down and the thud of heavy footsteps. A young girl, probably about eighteen or nineteen, is glaring at him full-force with an indignant but impassioned frown. Her hair is curly, a thin elastic barely keeping it all tied back behind her head.
She keeps about ten feet away from him at all times, he notices. “I’ll call the police on you if I see anymore of that. I’m tired of seeing people who are supposed to love each other doing just the opposite. You keep your hands off that poor boy, you hear?” With that, she turns tail and slips back into the door of her room, obviously not wanting to be alone in the vicinity of a man that she perceives as violent and reactive.
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Dean’s left stunned. How dare some random bitch talk to him like that? To him of all people, when he’s just a guy doing his best to save her ungrateful ass. If she knew, well, she’d be thanking Dean for saving the world by keeping his little brother in line. If she knew Sammy, she wouldn’t think that way. Besides, it doesn’t really matter what some immature teen at some random motel in the middle of Texas thinks, right?
-
“Dean,you need to calm down.” It’s the authority in Castiel’s voice that really breaks through the red haze in Dean’s mind, making him aware of what he’s doing. He throws one more punch for good measure before backing away, though.
He takes a step back and sighs, long and loud. “What do you want, Cas?”
“What are you doing? Why are you hurting your brother like this?” Cas does that obnoxious head tilt, like a damned puppy or whatever.
Dean rolls his eyes. Like he would actually hurt his real brother. “Hate to break it to you, Cas, but this isn’t the real Sammy..”
Castiel’s eyes widen comically. “What do you mean by that?”
“The goddess told me that he wasn’t human.”
“So, you trust the creature you were hunting enough to beat your brother until he’s incapable of breathing? You trust the goddess’ judgement so thoroughly?”
“Shut up. And help me get it cleaned up and back to the motel so we can see what’s using my brother’s body as a hiding place.”
-
Sometimes, family has to do the dirty work, whether they like it or not. He only did it to spare Sam’s feelings in the end. Amy would have turned, and they’d have to go back and kill her. All that would have done is rack up an even higher body count at the hands of the kitsune and upset Sam by giving him hope that he’s been able to save a monster and then snatching it away.
Then, Sam being the little brat that he is, runs away and has the audacity to be mad at him for this. Typical. Sammy has always been selfish, but he usually at least listens to reason. Something about his time wasted at Stanford made him open to facts, if not anything else Dean would say to him. Not this time, obviously.
When he confronts his brother about the situation, Sam jumps to defend himself and responds, “Don't pull that card! That's bull, Dean. Look, if I've learned one thing, it's that if something feels wrong, it probably is. I know I’m messed up Dean. I’m screwed to hell, but I’ve got it under control enough to know this isn’t right. Why can’t we help people anymore?” Yeah, and that’s how the apocalypse was started.
Instead, Dean tries to appease his younger brother (will he ever be done catering to Sam?) and says, “Usually, yeah. But killing Amy wasn’t the wrong choice. You couldn't do it, so I did. Plain as that. It's just what family does -- the dirty work. And I woulda told you, eventually, once I knew that this whole "waving a gun at Satan" thing was a one-time show. I think it's reasonable to want to know that you're off the friggin' high dive, Sam. You almost got us both killed, so you can be pissed all you want, but quit being a bitch.”
At the end of this godawful case, when Sam finally realizes that he was wrong and apologizes to Dean, everything feels right in the world again, even if only momentarily.
-
Dean doesn’t want to send the fake text. He doesn’t want to freak out his already anxiety-prone brother even more, but he doesn’t have a choice. Sammy just can’t be trusted to be told the truth, and he needs to get out of the way. Benny was there for him when Sam wasn’t. Facts are just facts.
Sam gets mad at him again once he gets back to the hotel, and isn’t that the kicker? It was for his own good. Not that he’d expect Sammy to be able to recognize that, of course. How would Sam have felt if Dean had let him run wild and he had ended up killing Benny, an innocent man, out of nothing but a misplaced sense of justice and an outrageous amount of jealousy.
No, Dean Winchester stands by his decision. He just needs Sam to come around to his point of view so he’ll stop acting like such a whiny bitch.
-
Sam has had enough. When he speaks, he remembers the days when he was a kid cowering in the corner of the motel room with Dean, their dad drunk. He sees the years as an adult feeling so afraid of messing up around Dean that he stopped trying to function on his own. He weaves the memories of being so ready to die just for the chance of his brother not hating him into his words as he lets them drop into the heavy air between them. As he speaks, he lets the thunder fall onto ears that have been closed off ever since they’d been teens. He lets loose the waves he felt everytime he was punched or hit by his own kin.
First and foremost, he thinks about the three times his body had been completely and totally not his, and the one time that it had been his brother doing the taking. “No, Dean, I wouldn’t. Same circumstances… I wouldn’t” Of course Sam wouldn’t shove a being into his brother’s body without his consent, no matter how miserable he was over Dean’s death. He wouldn’t dream of going back on any ounce of trust they had managed to salvage over the years. He wouldn’t dare inflict so much pain willingly onto a person he loves.
Dean gets this wounded look in his eyes, like he’s the victim here, like he’s the one whose entire world has been ripped apart because they thought they could trust the only person they’re allowed to be close to. Sam just… can’t. He turns around and goes to his room. And if he a few tears leak out into his pillow as he tries to go to sleep, well, nobody’s there to notice.
-
A week later, Sam and Dean are working together again and they pretend everything’s normal, but in actuality nothing’s the way it should be. If they’re being honest, their relationship hadn’t been right for years, but they no longer have any semblance of love or trust to cling to. All that’s left is bitterness and the harsh truth that their once strong bond is broken. They work, but each time they act like they’re separate hunters who happen to fight the same monster. Dean does his own research, and Sam does his own planning. Dean continues to constantly make snide passive aggressive marks in Sam’s general direction, though that’s not a new development.
The hunt they’re on is pretty simple, just a classic salt-and-burn for what feels like the first time in years. It’s the ghost of an abusive man who had been killed by his wife out of self-defense almost three decades ago. When Sam goes to interview her, she has a shaky voice and an even shakier hand, but she seems strong. And determined. She flinches when Sam mentions the name of her ex-husband, but isn’t freaked in the slightest when he mentions the possibility of the recent string of deaths being related to her husband. Instead, she sighs and said, “I was afraid of that. I’ve been… hearing him, I guess, at night.” Sam thanks her with a polite mask firmly set in place on his face, but with a sense of overwhelming dread welling up and flowing through his insides, threatening to burst.
Sam and Dean leave for the graveyard as soon as the sun starts to set. Their job would be loads easier if they could do it in the light of day, but they have to be discreet or risk being jailed. They discuss the case on the car ride over. When Sam points out the pattern of the ghost only attacking abuse victims, Dean gives a low whistle. “What a jacked-up freak,” Dean says. “Hurting the person he loves in life, and hurting even more poor, defenseless women on the other side. Just can’t understand sick fucks like that.”
The Impala pulls into the graveyard. Dean parks on the gravel lot provided for visitors. Luckily, there’s not another car in sight. Civilians would just be a risk of collateral at this point; no need to get them involved. This job should be a quick in and out, and maybe they can finally have a chance to catch more than a few hours of sleep tonight. The brothers have been on the road almost constantly, taking case after case to distract themselves from the growing rift between them.
It should be easy, and it is, until it’s not.
The ghost attacks Sammy, who’s not even the one trying to burn the bones. He ignores Dean, who was lighting up the bones. The ghost who was known to only go after victims of abuse went after his Sam.
Dean wants to throw up. All sorts of rationalizations go through his mind: residual from their childhood with dad (and Dean can admit now, years later, that their dad was abusive) or maybe aftermath from Sam’s time with Ruby. He tries to convince himself that Sam can’t be a victim, he’s too strong. Sam could never be taken advantage of, being a 6”4 giant. Besides, Dean would never intentionally hurt Sammy. All Dean wants is to protect his little brother, even if it means having to make some tough decisions.
Deep down though, Dean knows this is all wrong. He snarls, lashes out at a dazed Sam still sitting on the ground. “Get in the freakin’ car.”
As Sam hurries to obey and they drive away, Dean understands, finally, that he’s in the wrong. He just doesn’t know if he can change.